Emiel Kollof

Passionate geek with musical tendencies

Censorship through advertising

I have opinions that might rub people the wrong way (big list here). If you examine that list, you might pick up that I’m in favor of complete freedom of speech. This includes things I have disdain for or things I vehemently disagree with. Everyone should have a platform, no matter how disgusting the idea.

You might think: “where do you draw the line?”. It’s really simple. Physical violence or extreme psychological terror (which does not include offense). I also think people should be allowed to have violent speech. The crux is that if actual violence does happen, the person responsible for convincing others should be held responsible.

There is this website/blog in the Netherlands called Geenstijl. They are known for being right-wing-satiric and completely politically incorrect. They are course, crude, obnoxious and willfully abrasive, but they do have valid points every once in a while. The liberal “left” hates them. You could compare them to Breitbart, but that would be an incorrect comparison, because they don’t purport to be a news site.

Recently, some bleeding heart feminists decided to contact Geenstijl’s advertisers to get them to pull their ads, because of ‘reasons’. Most importantly because those feminists didn’t like what Geenstijl was doing, and Geenstijl does take on third wave inter-sectional feminists often. But instead of doing the reasonable thing, like asking people to not read Geenstijl anymore, they went after the income of the site. Of course Geenstijl didn’t like that and went on the defense. So did the people that like reading the site. Of course the readership of Geenstijl is even more course and obnoxious, and as happens when you disturb a hornet nest, they went on the attack.

Calling out to companies to stop their advertisement sets a dangerous precedent, in my opinion, and it yields a slippery slope. A good example is YouTube nowadays. Because some social marxists got their feefees twisted by a few people, companies withdrew their advertisements, hurting lots of small creators that had nothing to do with anything in the process. All for getting back at a few.

The bottom line is that advertisers shouldn’t care what they advertise on. Everyone knows that advertising is automatic and has no relation to the opinion expressed on the page which has the ad. Usually the product or service advertised is completely unrelated to the message posted anyway (and people know this). What’s really poignant is that people from the government are in support of this advertiser meddling. This is unacceptable.

By all means, boycott the site that you don’t like. Nobody forces you to go where you don’t want to go. Tell your friends not to go there. But don’t try to break a platform you don’t like. That’s ugly and totalitarian. The thing the SJWs supposedly are trying to fight.